A TALE OF gentrification and blues where sex is the underlying parlance and song lifts the dialogue into a different realm, Dominique Morisseau’s Paradise Blue is an African American foray into the complexity of the future for a 1949 Detroit club owner. The production, directed by James Ngcobo […]
THE SAD THING about living in this society, tainted as it is by political rhetoric, is that after having weathered the kind of circumstances which saw our former president Jacob Zuma use hundreds of millions of tax payers’ rands to create his own personal luxury compound – among […]
SOUTH AFRICAN ANTI-APARTHEID activist Stephen Bantu Biko (1946-1977) remains arguably one of the most urgent and compelling voices for South Africa’s contemporary youth. He was everything that a young intelligent man with moral fibre and passionate beliefs should be. And the horrible trajectory of his premature death at […]
FOUR FIERCE BLACK women toss caution and values to the wind in this carefully crafted take on hypocrisy, the culture of mourning and too much sugar in the African diet. Laced with political barbs and advocacy ciphers, the work is funny and crass, moving and evolved and little […]
WHEN A WORK touches you so deeply that elements in its direction have become part of how you see and speak about the world, you know that something’s been done right. In 2006, James Ngcobo directed the stage version of Es’kia Mphahlele’s tragic and beautiful tale The Suitcase. […]
IT WAS STORYTELLER extraordinaire Gcina Mhlophe who once commented that the art of storytelling lies not so much in the tale but in the telling. She could well have been referring to Itsoseng, a beautifully crafted love story in a time of disappointment and a place of poverty. It’s […]
THEATRE IS TRULY a magical medium. In casting fictional glances at real characters, it can unstitch the raw underbody of a myriad of political what-ifs and set your beliefs on edge. Playwright Jeff Stetson has woven a conversation between US Civil Rights heroes, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King […]
SOMETIMES YOU MAY be so overwhelmed by the iconic status of the creative team behind a work that you might be blinded as to its merits or otherwise. The Dying Screams of the Moon written by Zakes Mda and directed by John Kani is an intriguing piece of […]
IN 1984, DAVID Jones directed a delicate little film called 84 Charing Cross Road. It starred Anne Bancroft opposite Anthony Hopkins. It was a low key work which got critical acknowledgement but not a great deal of audience love, simply because the closure it embraces is death, rather than […]
HOW BEST DO you tell a story sullied and broken by trauma? Do you blurt it all out in one brutal shriek? Or do you give it context and framework? Do you make it circuitous? And funny? Joseph Heller did it. Alan Bleasdale did it. As did Luigi Pirandello. […]
Geoff Sifrin
Robyn Sassen
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